US defense contractor L3Harris Technologies Inc on Sunday said it would purchase Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc in a US$4.7 billion all-cash transaction, as it looks to tap into rising demand for missiles amid the Ukraine conflict.
The offer price of US$58 per share represents a premium of 6.5 percent to Aerojet’s close on Friday.
The deal, which is expected to be completed next year, would add to L3Harris’ Space & Airborne Systems unit, which makes electronic warfare equipment and avionics sensors.
Photo: AP
Reuters last month reported that L3Harris, formed by the merger of L3 Technologies and Harris Corp in 2019, was among the companies vying to buy Aerojet, which put itself up for sale after antitrust regulators blocked a merger with Lockheed Martin Corp earlier this year.
The US has assisted Ukraine with billions of US dollars in military aid, including missiles and air defense systems, driving up demand for missiles as allies also seek to boost their defenses.
Aerojet develops and manufactures liquid and solid rocket propulsion and hypersonic engines for space, defense, civil and commercial applications.
The market for rockets has also received an incentive from NASA, one of Aerojet’s main customers, which is pursuing moon and deep space missions with renewed vigor.
Aerojet makes the RS-25 engines for NASA’s launch vehicle, as well as the RL10 engines that power launch vehicles made by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin.
L3Harris, which has been investing in the space and cyberindustries, is looking to solidify its position among top aerospace and defense firms as one of the leading contractors to the Pentagon.
STATE SUBSIDIES: The talks over a factory in Dresden have a top end on par with what Japan is offering TSMC and outdo a cap other firms are being offered in Europe Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, is in talks to receive German government subsidies for as much as 50 percent of the costs to build a new semiconductor fab in the country, people familiar with the matter said. The government is in ongoing negotiations with TSMC, as well as its partners on the project — Bosch Ltd, NXP Semiconductors NV and Infineon Technologies AG — the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. No final decisions have been made and the final subsidy amount could still change. Any state aid must also
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness
RSS